


the only thing that has no end

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Complete, Established Relationship, First Kiss, Graphic Description, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Neil (Tenet), POV The Protagonist (Tenet), Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Through the Confusing Wonders of Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:42:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28675395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: [Post-Canon.] Following the events of Stalsk-12, the Protagonist grapples with the choice of recruiting a younger Neil to his cause, particularly after the younger Neil takes an inverted injury on the job.Neil, meanwhile, adjusts to the oddity of watching a grenade nearly kill him in reverse. ...he's also hitting on his boss as often as possible.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 68





	1. neil

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [cosmoscorpse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse) for brainstorming and beta-ing and helping me logic through the struggle of a half-inverted fight scene! 
> 
> The HC for this fic:  
> —21-year-old aspiring thief Neil met the Protagonist a year after canon events, when the Protagonist rescued him from a bad situation.  
> —8 years after Stalsk-12, on the Protagonist's orders, Neil inverts to travel back to Kiev and begin the endgame events of the movie.  
> —Future-Neil takes occasional non-inverted pitstops along the way to visit with the Protagonist and get a break from the interminable boring of living in a bubble. He also provides Sam with precisely zero helpful advice regarding his hopelessly smitten younger self.
> 
> This first chapter is from the POV of the young Neil, a few months after his recruitment to Tenet.

This must be  
what love is:

a pain so radiant  
it cuts through all others.

—Sara Eliza Johnson, “Beekeeping”

Stale air drags across his tongue. He shouldn’t be breathing so hard; shouldn’t be starving for air.

 _What have we learned,_ he chides himself. Months of training, he knows now how to stop: breathe. Read the room.

The men behind their fogged masks breathe harder still, condensation peeling back to nothing with each reversed exhale. They’re in the wrong time for Neil to understand. He can’t understand the boss, either, eyes wide in fury and (fear?). His mask further obfuscates the incomprehensible rage spilling out of his mouth.

He can’t understand what they are saying, so there is little for him to do but stare: at the men still in an inverted retreat from the doorway, fleeing the bloodstains on the floor.

He stares at the blood trailing down from cratered and chipped concrete. The way Boss’s fingers adjust to the disorienting recoil of his pistol as he aims at dead-undead men.

 _Find your footing,_ the boss had explained once. _Follow time upstream, look for the inflection points._

The bodies outside hadn’t startled Neil. The blood pooling back from whence it came, that was the unsettling part. Seeing dead men run back through the door in reverse, a few moments later.

A death undone.

And here’s Boss’s finger on the trigger.

Here’s dead-and-undead men.

Neil breathes stale, copper-heavy air. There is a dead body at his feet. There is blood crawling up the wall, and he doesn’t know whose it is, not entirely. Some could be his, spilled and to-be-spilled. Some could be the dead man on the floor, who looks torn apart. Bone and sinew a stark white in the red gristle of meat.

Blood flows, leading a slow trail back to its source, and as Neil stares, a fine powder of settling dust begins to draw together, thickening into a cloud.

The man holding him upright breathes heavy against his neck. He’s the last one standing in forward motion, unmasked and nervous. He shifts impatiently, sweaty hands tugging Neil’s wrists another burning inch up the small of his back. The man trembles as he stares at the same scene as Neil, muttering some small catechism Neil can’t make out.

Trapped in Schrödinger’s nightmare, and Neil can’t decide which of them is the cat.

He tries to keep the fear crawling over the back of his tongue trapped behind his teeth, but the blood spills up and up, closer to its source, and he can’t stop the rusty, “Boss,” that escapes his mouth.

The Boss’s eyes are already on him when he speaks, of course. On him and tearing away, as the shrapnel begins to dance and jitter, and something cinches tight in Neil’s gut.

The man holding him breaks. He shouts in surprise, twists to run. A sudden release of pressure from Neil’s wrists, but too late.

Neil attended his share of magic shows as a boy: lingering on the streetcorners, watching the performers send silk handkerchiefs flying through the air.

_Magic._

Eventually he learned there were bits of string looped around the magician’s fingers, tugging those colorful, fluttering things along their path.

He looks for the string now, as Boss tugs the dead body off the floor without even touching, hands upheld in an open-palmed shove.

Chipped concrete reforms with a strange spitting sound, rejecting jagged bits of metal, stained red.

Blood dances across the air, rainfall in reverse.

The aftermath of a life pulls together.

The boss pulls, and the dead man is rudely pulled back to life. Blood clotting and reforming around the ever-compacting points of torn muscle, all of it retreating back to a single nexus: an explosion in reverse.

The silver of a grenade pin flashes on a man’s finger in the corner as he crouches, shoulder turned away from the blast. One white shining eye turned their way over the clouded plastic of his mask.

The dead-and-not man doesn’t eclipse Neil, not entirely. Not enough to stop that one piece of shrapnel, following its determined path back to its source. The strange tug of something tearing through him in the wrong direction, just below his ribs.

Another string drawing tight as it pierces him through.

Time, in all its flexibility, is damnably relative: it has been minutessince a pair of thugs jumped him at his hideaway crow’s nest. Since they dragged him here, past the dead-and-not. One died on the way here, dropped to his knees, choking. The other pushed him on.

It has been seconds, it has been _years,_ since he first stared at the carnage of this scene and thought, _How much of that is mine?_

A fair share of it. Blood torn from him and inverted, flung back into a different course of history. Painting the walls, in his past, while Neil falls slow to his knees, in the future.

His ears are ringing.

 _It doesn’t hurt,_ he thinks for a moment, as he slips aside and to the concrete proper. Boots scrape on the concrete, forward and reverse. The newly-intact grenade on the floor - looking deceptively small for all its fury - skews in a small circle before leaping back to the hand of the man that had thrown it.

The bastard that dragged him here is running out the door.

The Boss shouts, muffled, and pulls the undead man into something like an embrace as he takes aim and fires.

The bastard that dragged him here is skewing abruptly sideways, tripping over his own feet as his head - blooms.

 _It doesn’t hurt,_ he thinks, in this new and stagnant time he’s found.

But then he feels the heat spreading over his belly, and he can’t help but shut his eyes and trace it back to cold and cold and _cold--_

And he makes a low, startled noise, something like an, “Oh.”

A single, strangled exhale, before his chest seizes up and the cold bites sharp into his flesh and he is _screaming_

And the boss—

Boss is

backing away, in a hurried reverse, his pistol falling to his side.

Eyes wide, never leaving him, the broken thing lying on the floor. The harbinger of an explosion that hasn’t happened.

But he isn’t surprised.

(He’s never surprised.)

Neil fights for breath, fights to scream, _Don’t,_ as he reaches out with a shaking hand; surely the boss will understand _that_ , even in reverse: _**don’t don’t don’t leave don’t**_

But the doorway is-has been-will be empty and he slaps his hand down over his own mouth to stifle the agonized cry as his back snaps into tighter conformation, arching against that spreading agony of cold, cells shredding apart with the slow spread of inverted time like a poison—

Cold and cold and cold the heat-death of the universe blooming in real time within him and he could _laugh_ if he could force it past the ragged screams

If he could breathe, he could beg

_Come back_

If he could breathe—

_stay stay stay with me_

As the floor clears, men fleeing in reverse-step, and he is left to himself

If he could just—

Breathe

He flinches from the heat of someone else’s skin, a rough palm smearing in the blood that’s begun to spill out from beneath his collar, pooling in the hollow of his throat.

Words break over him like waves: “ _Neil._ I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

He blinks up at the boss, pushing a mask back from his face and looking stricken. This is where he should have words, this is where he should grab his wrist and reassure him—

Or ask if he is dying—

Or ask him, _Where the hell have you been?_

But Boss looks shit, absolute shit, blood smeared on his cheek and clotted in his beard and the hand pressing against his pulse is trembling as he tugs his hand regretfully away and says, “We’re going.”

 _Going_ is the surprise sting of a needle in his arm, a temporary distraction from the monumentality of the rest. Morphine, he thinks, but perhaps not enough, because _going_ is also being _carried_ , and Neil finds the boss’s vest and bears down until he can feel the bite of his own fingernails through the fabric with the gravity-tug of every footfall, black creeping up the edges of his vision, narrowing down to blood in forward-time, the rise and fall of men fleeing blindly towards the bullets that will undo them.

Time slips away entire. He blinks at the bland off-white fabric of a car ceiling from the cold of a backseat.

He stares at the hazed reflection of a man with his jaw clenched tightly shut, hard eyes set on the road ahead.

He blinks. Time slips. And then there’s a hand floating in front of him, an offer.

He reaches slowly, feeling out the thick air with fingers that tingle, nerves giving out with thready shock and the syrupy pull of the morphine. He catches that offered hand jutting through the front seats, and the fingers snare his, holding him tight.

Warm.

The boss catches him staring in the mirror. “You don’t die here, Neil,” he says with a laughable surety.

Neil is certain he is seeing death in that rearview mirror: gray and cold, but sparking on the edges.

Not as bad as he thought. Not with this one point of warmth, holding him tightly.

“Isn’t fair,” he rasps. “Haven’t told me your name.”

 _Don’t have one,_ is the answer he’s received a thousand times before.

This time, Boss says, “I will.”

Red light stains the back of his eyelids, and he tilts his head to see the boss straightening from the wall, and Neil corrects himself:

No, Boss can be surprised. Boss can be undone with raw _shock_ , standing there like his feet have been nailed to the floor.

This boss - one a few minutes younger, Neil supposes - was waiting. Waiting for Neil just this side of the turnstile, Neil who was going to sit and observe, debrief him and send him on his inverted way to run the mission alone.

It didn’t go well. That’s all Neil supposes he’d report, if he could convince his throat to work. He stares, glassy-eyed, fingers clenching-unclenching in the fabric of the gurney.

“Go,” orders the minutes-older boss standing next to him, one hand bearing down with an agonizing pressure into the cold-cold-cold crawling through Neil’s gut, the other digging through the medkit balanced on Neil’s shoulder. Something arcs across the room, pings off of the younger boss’s chest: a capped syringe. Morphine.

“Go _now,_ ” the boss tells himself.

Boss looks at Neil, once, mouth cramping tight in (regret?) and he’s gone, too fast for Neil to follow.

“Neil,” Boss says, a hand hovering heavy over his bleary peripheral vision.

Neil blinks once for _still here._

Boss drags him into dark: the low thud of the turnstile, resonating in that freezing core of him. Warming it slow. Or chilling the rest of him, he isn’t sure.

Boss pulls him through, from red into blue: Neil watches himself trapped in glass, tugged in reverse.

“That’ll stop the spread,” Boss says. All calm-and-dulcet tones, while Neil blinks owlishly up at him.

It doesn’t feel better. It feels like _fire_ , now, Neil’s breath hitching around the clawing flames.

His breaths turn strangled, as the boss slips a mask over his face. Stale air floods his mouth as he gasps, a slow, cold trickle of it.

“Stay,” Neil chokes past the heavy damp of his panting exhales.

And a hand carves through his hair slow, a familiarity that has been and will be, Neil is _sure,_ so sure—

“I’m staying,” the boss promises.

And Neil believes.

He doesn’t believe much, but he believes that.

“You remember how we met?” Neil says, barely audible over the click-and-hiss of the respirator. He stares at a riveted-metal ceiling: helicopter or boat, he doesn’t know. There are a lot of metal walls in their lives, deceptive in their solidity.

The boss blinks from where he’s resting with his chin on his folded arms. Considers, and nods.

Neil crammed up between a wardrobe and a wall in Belgium, broken arm tucked tight against his chest. Feeling like some new and hollow thing under the bruises and the cuts of a job gone wrong, old skin freshly shed. He stared at this strange special-ops agent, something out of a rote spy novel.

A faceless thing behind a glassy-eyed mask. But he tucked his pistol away, held out a hand and said, _I’ve got you._

A shift of his head just enough to clear the glare on his mask, showing the shine of a kind eye.

And Neil believed him.

Never could decide on a why.

Fate, maybe.

“Need a new line,” Neil mumbles.

The boss doesn’t surprise easy, but Neil startles him into a smile, every now and again. A point of pride, even in a red haze of shocky pain.

“Yeah? Feel free to submit a complaint with HR,” the boss says. Neil makes a face. As far as he knows, the boss _is_ HR. He’s any number of things, known and unknown. One more blind-and-blinded cog of Tenet.

But he’s the one Neil _wants,_ desperately, desperately—

It takes time he doesn’t care to measure for him to breathe and swallow and scrape together enough of an exhale to say: “Should go back to Brussels.”

That stark little safehouse, where the boss had hid him away. Let him breathe, for awhile, as his arm healed up. It wasn’t much, but it’s where he got to see the boss’s face for the first time. Got to figure out how to make him laugh.

“Wish we could,” the boss says. “Back to sea, for now. Need to stay inverted awhile. Let that heal.”

Salt air and dead fish stink, the constant chop of the North Sea. Neil shakes his head. “Should tell me your name,” he says instead, negotiating for some kind of recompense, even as exhaustion’s slowly dragging his eyes shut.

“Not yet,” the boss says.

“Stay,” Neil exhales, last of all.

He doesn’t hear the answer.

Thinks he knows it, anyway.

He’s gained a bit of the boss’s foresight, here and there. Faith like a palmful of sand: a few barely-there grains, glittering as they catch the light.

”Are you from the future?” he’d asked the boss once, just after he’d been introduced to the principles of inversion. The two of them standing shoulder-to-shoulder, studying the strangely crude carved-metal lines of a turnstile.

”No,” the boss answered. After a moment’s consideration, he corrected: “Not today.”

”Seemed a natural question,” Neil said, “what with how arrogant you are.”

The boss snorted. ”And if I was? What would you ask me?”

Neil didn’t consider his answer at all. Only flashed him a cocksure smile and said, ”When you’re going to get around to kissing me.”

He’d been damn certain that would be the thing to startle some surprise out of his unflappable boss, but no: what he got was a warm laugh, and a moment’s contemplation.

A promise, spelled out in warm silence.

Neil weighs his faith and knows he can wait.


	2. sam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Protagonist works his way through the complications of his once-and-future relationship with Neil.

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.  
—Erwin Schrödinger, “My View of the World”

As he carries through the idle motions of checking over his pistol, he’s thinking about Amsterdam: his last visit there, a few weeks back.

(He shouldn’t be. He’s on a mission, even if his present objective is ‘ _Sit here and patiently wait.’_ The only sound in his earpiece is the low hum of white noise.But Neil has a habit of distracting him. Past, present, and future.)

He’s thinking of an older Neil, a secret only he and a handful of core Tenet staff know about. A man on a slow, miserable inverted slog back through the past.

Back to Kiev. To the beginning, and the end.

But that’s not on his mind, right now. Right now he’s thinking of a sunshine-soaked flat, the faint smell of sea. Opening the door to Neil sprawled on the couch, one leg thrown over the back, his foot bobbing idly to the beat of whatever he’s listening to on his battered MP3 player.

Neil always seems to be waiting-but-not, comfortable in the certainty that his lover will be walking through that door soon enough. Leaning over the back of the couch, brushing the mess of hair away from his face. 

A ghost of a smile crosses his lips as he bears his shoulder back into the wall. He’s thinking of the way Neil sprang to sudden animation when he leaned down to kiss his forehead; grabbed the back of his head and found his lips proper. The white noise keeps on droning in his ear.

It’s an odd future he’s found himself in. Stuck between the young Neil, a recent recruit, and the old: a familiar lover, who’d startled him badly the first time he’d murmured, “ _Sam._ ”

A name he hadn’t heard in years. Sealed up before he’d taken the special ops job, and buried after Kiev.

One he’d tried to forget himself, in the months after Kiev, after Stalsk-12, but with Neil—

It’s hard to forget.

“When do I tell you my old name?” Sam asked once. (Unlike Neil, he only asks _once._ )

“I don’t remember,” was Neil’s first coy answer, and when Sam pinned him down and used his best interrogative stare, he only got a smile and a shrug in answer.

“For me to find out, huh,” Sam muttered.

Neil’s smile only widened. “A little mystery does you good.”

The young Neil, well.

Unexpected in a lot of ways.

 _Persistent_ to a ridiculous degree, since Sam’s brought him into Tenet proper. Pickup lines, long stares, skipping out on his training at the first indication that Sam’s on base. Breaking into his quarters on more than one occasion, usually to borrow from his stash of liquor and talk about whatever rambling topic comes to mind. 

Neil has no idea just who he’s hitting on, yet - although Wheeler takes a particular amusement in watching his dogged pursuit of Tenet’s highest-ranking and least-known officer.

“For every bad pickup line, I push things back a week,” Sam assured the older Neil, once.

Neil just answered with a self-satisfied shrug, curling tighter around him. “I knew you’d break eventually.”

They joke, but - Sam’s trapped in a corner of uncertainty, with the younger Neil. He’s just…

He’s _young._ Over ten years younger than any Neil he’s known.

And Sam knows how this road ends. Every time he puts a gun in Neil’s hands, watches his mouth thin into a firm line of determination to hide his discomfort, he thinks of Stalsk-12.

He thinks of the red string he’s tied around this young man’s wrist. One that will drag him inevitably back to an impossible choice.

So he plays along with the flirting, but he stays a step back. Lets everything... percolate. _Faith in the mechanics of the universe,_ Neil had said, and Sam’s still finding his place in that, still trying to decide where his personal culpability begins and ends.

Choice and fate: a knife balanced on a fingertip.

He still has his own lessons to learn.

Wasn’t expecting a lesson _today._

This is a simple job: intercepting a handoff of inverted weapons. Light security. Simple. He’s barely given it any thought, focusing primarily on this as a training opportunity for Neil.

That’s the idea, anyway.

Sam still gets surprised, sometimes.

He startles away from the wall at the bang of the outer door, his hand tightening on the pistol he’d been just about to holster.

He isn’t expecting a _gurney._ Isn’t expecting Neil, pale and gray, forehead bright with sweat.

Isn’t expecting himself, fixing him with a hard stare. His hand clamped down hard over the soaked-through compress over Neil’s chest as he says, “Go.”

Sam’s running through the math quick: inverted _twice_ , what the _fuck_ happened—

But he’s catching the syringe future-him tosses reflexively, tucking it into his vest.

Staring at Neil, thinking about strings.

Neil stares back, eyes glazed with pain.

There was a moment, in Oslo—

(A very stupid moment, Sam thought at the time, fucking a man he barely knew, _on the job—_ )

But there’d been a moment, where Neil had dropped back to pull his unbuttoned shirt free, and Sam couldn’t keep his eyes away from the scar just below his ribs. A jagged thing, the skin roped and pale. Couldn’t help but trace its exit with his fingertips later, interrupting the smooth lines of his back.

“That looks like it hurt,” Sam murmured.

“It did,” Neil said, and wouldn’t say anything else about it.

“Go _now,”_ future-Sam snaps with impatience, and Sam jumps to.

Barrels through the turnstile and out, keeps his attention off of the car on the far side of the safety barrier: off his forward-self, a wounded Neil folded in his arms like a discount-store _pieta._

He piles into the waiting car. 

He hates driving inverted.

(Neil hates it more. Told him once, _Your driving is shit enough forward,_ before stealing the keys.)

The steering wheel creaks under his grip as he forces down that nauseating feeling of inverted momentum, the tangled counter-forces of the forward-and-reverse world around him doing their best to tug his stomach out of his nose.

It isn’t far. The minutes peel back before him, and he has to keep tempering his thinking: this can’t be undone. It can’t.

He sprints past Neil’s lookout spot up on the stack of shipping containers. He watches his forward self down below, pushing Neil towards the warehouse.

He keeps swimming upstream. Heads for the back entrance, sees his error: not the three to four Neil had confirmed moving in the front. Twelve of them. 

He clears the three guarding the back entrance quietly as he can. 

He crashes into the backroom and sees _Neil_ , already on the floor, already bleeding. Staring wild-eyed his way, one hand reaching out. Every line of his face is scripted in an agonized plea.

Sam doesn’t save him, not on this pass. Knows that, _knew_ that the moment he saw Neil on that gurney, but accepting it— that’s something else.

He shouts, useless as it is, buried behind his mask.

Shouts his frustration and _fury,_ as he marks his shots and takes them. The first is a forward-moving man peeling up from the floor, catching the bullet always meant for him.

He shoots three dead before he sees the grenade. He doesn’t aim fast enough, and knows he never will. There’s no undoing this damage.

 _It did,_ Neil said, matter-of-factly.

It did and it will. Pain blooming in reverse, as Neil’s screams fade back into the stagnant shock of fresh injury.

He shoots the man that threw it through the head. Much good it will do. Then he sprints two steps forward, seizes up one of the inverts and throws him into Neil as time tugs him inevitably back into the path of the grenade.

The grenade explodes.

Sharp bite of some shrapnel on Sam’s shoulder, but it doesn’t matter much. Not while he’s inverted.

The man that took the brunt of it hits the floor at Neil’s feet.

Neil stares at him. Whole, now, pale but surprisingly calm, as the forward-motion antagonist Sam’s killed once already grabs at his wrists.

It’s the closest this Neil has come to the one Sam met in Mumbai: a strange point of stillness, in among all the chaos. Focus only on him.

And all Sam can do is retreat.

He kills the rest of the inverted. Leaves dead man scattering the floor.

Races back to the turnstile, skating past the younger-Sam that isn’t waiting by the turnstile anymore - he’s out back, listening in for Neil’s last transmission before going mission silent.

Back to forward motion.

Tearing through the warehouse with the efficiency of physics he knows well: killing the ones left behind, inverted and non. Hell of a lot more than Sam thought there’d be, but he’s tearing through them in both directions, now. Making short work of it.

Learning from his mistake.

He skids into that room of dead men and grabs Neil, Neil looking lost and young and _small_ and exhaling a low rasping whine through his teeth.

Sam’s babbling, “Neil, I’ve got you, I’ve got you—” like Neil can even _hear_ him, as he shoves the tactical mask back off his face and presses at his throat, feeling that thready-but-stubborn pulse.

Neil’s mouth works, boots sliding uselessly on the dusty floor as he writhes, but he doesn’t speak. Can’t.

“We’re going,” Sam promises, freeing the morphine syringe from his vest and shoving Neil’s sleeve up to work it into the vein. It isn’t enough to stop the pain outright, Sam knows that from his own shit experiences, but it’ll dull the edge.

He gets compact bandages onto the wound, cinches them tight, and picks Neil up careful as he can. Rote motions: things he doesn’t have to think about, letting his hands move without direction, ignoring the heat of Neil’s blood wetting his skin.

Leaves his brain free to spin out around the feel of Neil’s chest hitching in pain, the fingers wound tight in the straps of his vest. The silence of his footfalls in this empty warehouse, an inflection point of the living and the dead.

He slides Neil carefully into the backseat of the car, gently loosens the fingers from his collar. He thinks, with that selfish and ashamed churn of his gut, that he doesn’t want Neil’s eyes on him.

But that’s the part of himself that he’s starting to recognize as a coward, unwilling to reconcile _love_ with _sacrifice._

He’s always happy enough to retreat to Amsterdam, to the comfort of a relationship he hasn’t had to build yet, but he’s unwilling to confront this: the price he’ll make Neil pay for every day he spends in his service.

 _I’m sorry,_ is what he can’t say. _Christ, I’m so sorry._

He tries to make the pieces fit, make the scales balance, but he _can’t,_ he can’t see it, yet—

Not with a pale and blood-streaked Neil in the rearview mirror, every breath a slow, agonized drag.

 _‘That looks like it hurt,’_ Sam said.

And Neil answered, ‘ _It did_ ,’ and there was no qualifier there that Sam could tell.

‘It did.’

He swallows hard and catches Neil again in the rearview: Neil staring at him with that dazed, puzzled wonder of his. Like Sam is another lock to pick apart, if he can just find the right angle of his wrist.

 _What is it you expect to find, inside?_ Sam wants to ask, whenever he catches this younger Neil staring at him that way.

Whatever Neil’s snappy answer, Sam knows how he’ll respond: _Isn’t much. I promise._

Just a name. Just a man.

Sure as hell isn’t worth all of _this._

But Neil keeps reaching for him, nonetheless, and Sam just keeps shying away.

Sam grits his teeth and jams his hand back between the seats, an offer. Feels his heartrate redouble as a cold hand meets his fingers, brushing weakly against his palm before Sam’s securing his hold.

Sam meets his eyes, this time.

He promises, “You don’t die here, Neil.”

And his stomach roils with a fresh cramp of guilt as the dying man in the backseat murmurs, “Isn’t fair. Haven’t told me your name.”

“Come on. _When,_ ” Sam insisted in the sunlight fantasy of an Amsterdam flat.

Neil grinned up at him as he snaked a lanky arm slow around Sam’s waist. “I get _some_ secrets.”

“Not from me.”

“ _Especially_ from you.” And in a surprising burst of energy, he had Sam flipped and pinned to the bed, a hand splayed wide on his chest as he settled across Sam’s hips.

It’s a question he’s deferred a hundred times before, ever since he rescued a gangly would-be thief from a shit Brussels apartment.

He’d spent a week babysitting a 21-year-old Neil in Brussels, ensuring Wheeler cleaned up the rest of the crew that’d beaten the kid to shit for failing to steal them a gold cache that didn’t exist - an _inverted_ prize, continuing on its way to the past.

They’d gotten into six arguments about his name, before Neil settled into referring to him with a sarcastic, ‘friend.’

Neil kept asking. Sam kept deferring. _‘Don’t have one_ ,’ and ‘ _don’t need one,’_ and on one memorable occasion, ‘ _Ebenezer, how about that?’_

 _‘I_ will _take you at your word, one of these days,’_ Neil retorted. _‘and that’ll be your name. Do you want to make that mistake, Ebenezer?’_

Shying away, over and over again.

Like this, a name, an _acknowledgment,_ is the last link in the chain that will drag Neil down.

He tightens his grip around Neil’s frigid hand.

“I will,” he says.

“I’m sorry,”he’d told Neil, his first time in that Amsterdam flat. Words weighted down, drenched in a grief he couldn’t share with a single soul. He’d only been six months out from the hypocenter, with a dead Neil behind him and an open-and-shut future ahead of him.

The to-be-dead Neil standing before him smiled - a crooked and tempered thing. But he stepped forward, too, closing the distance between them with a practiced ease.

“It’ll balance, Sam,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Neil asks him to stay. He still sounds young, _too young,_ hurt and frightened, and the _finality_ of the two of them still scares Sam in a way that leaves him trembling—

But it’s never even a question.

He stays.

He’ll always stay.

That finality, that _certainty,_ runs both ways.

Sam rests a hand in the familiar crux of Neil’s shoulder, feels the steady rhythm of his heart.

He lets the first anticipation of what hasn’t been bloom in his chest: firsts for Neil, if not for him. There will be better places, better moments, sunshine and the taste of whiskey on Neil’s lips, things neither of them have lived, yet.

He slides his mask up just long enough to press a kiss to Neil’s forehead. It’ll probably piss Neil off, he figures, being in a drugged-up sleep for that first act of outright affection.

But there’s something tugging at the corner of Neil’s mouth, behind the mask. A lilting little smile. Sam tilts his head aside and snorts the last of his exhale, as he slides the mask back into place and draws a fresh breath of inverted air.

Sam crosses his arms and settles down to wait, one hand wrapped tight around Neil’s wrist. Matching every heartbeat to his own.

+++

_Fedje, Norway_

He finds Neil sitting in front of the window, watching the snow fall in reverse.

He’s got a speech all wrapped up about how he didn’t bust Neil out of the tender loving care of a grim _Magne_ Nurse Ratched for him to tear open his stitches again, about how he’s going to cuff him to the bed if he can’t get him to _stay put._ But it’s surprisingly hard to get the words out when he’s confronted with the image of Neil’s tousled-hair reflection poking up out of a stolen comforter. Neil sits hunched under the massive blanket and watches the snow rise with wide eyes, following the flakes’ zigzagging path towards a gray sky.

So Sam sets the lecture aside and settles down cross-legged next to him, tilting his head aside. Clumps of snow separating and rising like fat, anti-gravity cornflakes. Sam smiles at the thought.

“You’re thinking something terribly unpoetic, aren’t you,” Neil accuses.

“Always.” 

Sam shoots him a sidelong glance, taking a measure of him. Still pale, a bit sunken under the eyes - but he’s looking alert, as he meets Sam’s gaze. It’s a welcome change from the last few days, Neil trading mostly between the shivering delirium of pain and a drugged sleep.

Neil’s alert enough to get back to his usual train of thought, apparently, because he sets his mouth in a grim line and says, “I’ve decided, if I can’t get a name, I’ll settle on a kiss.”

“Maybe we’ve already kissed,” Sam replies. 

(A hundred times.

The first in Oslo was a hesitant thing: Sam up in his own head with guilt about doing something this _stupid_ on the job, but Neil’s hand was sliding warm under the hem of his shirt and their feet were tangling on the threshold of the bedroom, so - he had to. Had to catch the back of his neck and kiss him, once, just to make sure.

And Neil kissed him back with something like relief.)

Neil’s eyes narrow at the admission, although there’s a quirk of a smile giving him away. “So you are from the future.”

“Sure. ‘bout a week. Same as you.”

Neil’s suspicious stare doesn’t falter. “Then _when._ ”

“Couple days ago, on the trip back to the _Magne._ ” He leans forward and kisses Neil on the forehead again, a perfect mirror. “Like so,” he says.

“That,” Neil states with his most over-enunciated offended tone, “absolutely, categorically _does not count._ ”

“Does,” Sam answers.

There’s this impulse, to him and Neil. The one that had him reach out in that Oslo hotel room and grab Neil’s wrist as he stood up to go. It surprised them both to stillness, the only motion the steady rhythm of Neil’s heartbeat under his fingertips.

He imagines this is how it must feel for the inverted materials they tug at, puppeteered by the has-been/will-be nature of their lives.

That magnetic pull, as Neil grabs the back of his neck here, the two of them moving alone against an inverted world, and tugs him back down. Sam smiles against his lips. No taste of whiskey, this time, but a familiar enough taste as Neil opens his mouth to him. 

Sam catches Neil’s slow, shaking exhale of _relief_ before he pulls away. 

He sees everything Neil will be, staring up at him with wide eyes. Feels his heart breaking fresh over the man who’d walked away from him with a smile and a wave. He can only wonder what Neil sees reflected in him: an unknown framed in inverted snow.

And then Neil grins - an absurd, delirious thing - and says, “I knew it. Madly in love with me.”

“It’s the humility,” Sam answers, drawing a laugh and a grimace out of him. Sam tugs at the corner of his cocoon. Neil raises an arm, giving him space to move in close and pull the comforter tight over them both.

They settle in under the warmth of the comforter, knees bumping, elbows and shoulders carefully arranged around injuries old and new. Neil finds Sam’s fingers, snares them tightly in his own.

Sam’s waiting for that little _tug_. That pull that he’s come to trust, not resist.

And there it is: just as Neil’s dozing off on his shoulder, as the first blades of grass are shivering their way out of the diminishing snow.

“It’s Sam,” he murmurs. “Used to be.”

Neil stirs, inhales slow. “Sam,” he exhales. Turning the sound of it over, reverential, his voice heavy with that verge-of-sleep weight that Sam’s come to love.

A memory for the both of them, slotting into place.

He thinks about Amsterdam. Thinks about that older Neil, making the slow trek back. Moving past all these years, one last time, and doing it alone. They haven't talked about that. He doesn't know if they ever will.

There are guarantees in life, Sam thinks, as Neil's exhales slow into proper sleep. A few. Most of them are a curse, losses etched in stone, but the rest… Well.

”It’ll balance,” he murmurs to the first-and-last of the rising snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading and for the lovely comments!


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